Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/265

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which are considerably an advance on the old convent system of education. Nuns are the worst teachers in the world and the least conscientious. We have the exposure by the Archbishop of Nancy of the method of the nuns of the Bon Pasteur, who train orphans, and instead of teaching them, merely exploit them, and keep up a flourishing institution on the hard labour of children and girls, and, when the time for leaving the convent arrives, cast them out without an outfit or a farthing of all the immense sums they have earned for the convent when they ought to have been learning lessons. Of course, these republican schools are thwarted and vexed by every kind of petty persecution on the part of the clerical party. The French Catholics detest the lay teachers, whom they regard as the rivals of the Christian Brothers and the nuns, and make them suffer accordingly. Their writers of predilection make a point of holding them up for public scorn and ridicule, and so M. Henri Lavedan shows us, in that detestable play, Le Vieux Marcheur, a country teacher, Mademoiselle Léontine Falempin, all that she ought not to be; and M. de Vogüé, to be true to the modern traditions of the French aristocrat, when he makes the base heroine of his dull novel, Les Morts qui Parlent, go wrong, jeeringly says, "So acted the pupil of the good M. Pécaut." M. Pécaut, a respected and popular citizen who died lately,